PlayStation 4 will have MP3 and CD playback

Sony's President of Worldwide Studios confirmed that the company is listening to its fans and will make sure the PS4 can play MP3s and CDs -- just not on "day one."

"It's not like we actively decided 'yeah let's not do these features so that people will subscribe to Music Unlimited,'" was Shuhei Yoshida's jocular explanation, speaking in an interview released November 12 via Giant Bomb.

Yoshida had talked up the merits of being visible and available on Twitter, getting near-instant feedback on fans' reactions to PlayStation announcements.

"A couple of weeks ago we announced a lot of details of 'this is available on day one and these are not on day one.'"

"The biggest surprise was that there are so many people that passionately reacted to the announcement that there was no MP3 or DLNA [home media server tech] on day one."

Internally, though, MP3 CD and DNLA features were something about which Shu and the PlayStation engineers thought "we are going to do it eventually."

"So, as we speak, the people in teams in Japan and the US -- the system guys -- are discussing when we can put these features in PS4," he reassured.

If anything, the oversight illustrates how the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One differ in their approaches to multimedia features.

Internally, the two machines are very much alike, with the PS4 given bigger and faster memory, and the XBO justifies its higher price by packing in the Kinect voice and motion control sensor.

And while both boxes are capable of streaming film, TV and music from the net, the PlayStation 4 is publicly focused on gaming, while the Xbox One's presented as an all-round device, with a system-level design that lets it switch between all four applications.